Sold As Is

Ruth Ann Colby died at eighty-nine at the end of Mill Road, and the county has one story about her: the poor old maid, never married, all alone out there. Her nephew wants the house cleared by Thanksgiving, and a cash offer for the whole estate is on the table.

In the attic, under decades of dust, one thing is clean. A spool-turned cradle, polished along the top rail, in a swept circle. Laid across it, corner to corner, a christening gown, hand-sewn, complete to the last buttonhole, and never once worn. The bench dates the cradle to 1953. In 1953 Ruth Ann Colby was nineteen years old.

Eli Marsh kept the county's time for fifty years — the courthouse, the church, the school, the noon whistle — and died in a bungalow packed to the picture rails with everything he ever refused to let go of. Ten days later every clock in it has stopped. All but one.

The tall-case clock in the back room stands in the only clear space in the house. And at nine minutes short of five, evening and dark of morning both, it strikes twelve and one more — deliberate as a man laying one more stone on a wall. Inside the trunk door, in pencil, are sixty years of service dates in one hand.

Merritt Ordway lived alone in eleven rooms over the river for forty years — four she could heat and seven she shut, and walked twice a year to look at the ceilings. She left it to a niece eleven hundred miles away who met her twice and will not be coming. Sell it, whatever it's worth.

On the third floor is an album quilt from 1861, a hundred blocks, ninety-nine signed in thread by ninety-nine women of the county. Effie Bane. Sarah Kell. The piecing is one hand. The quilting is one hand. Six stitches to the inch, top and bottom. And the third row, fourth from the left, carries nothing.

Orrin Landis died in his chair in half a double house on Water Street where he had rented forty-five years. Four rooms, almost nothing in them, no family coming. His landlord turns out to be his executor and finds it out at four in the morning, reading a paper out of his own drawer.

In the back room stands a painted dower chest, dated 1848, empty. On the second morning a teaspoon is lying on the floor of it, off the landlord's own rack, out of a house he slept in with the door locked from the inside. There are two keys to that house in the world, and both of them are in that room.

Althea Boyer died at ninety-one in February and the bank shut the furnace off the same week. The trust department wants the house reduced to cash by the last Saturday in April, for three beneficiaries who have never met one another. There is not a thing in it a room full of people would fight over.

Third drawer of the bedroom dresser, in a shoebox of costume jewelry, under two strands of glass pearls: a square of flannel folded over something the size of a walnut. Gold-filled, hairwork under beveled glass. Fair market, four to six hundred. Replacement, twelve hundred. Nobody pays for warm.

Orlan Zook died in the front room of the house he had filled out on Tinshop Road, and Tarrow County has had one word for him ever since. Fifteen rooms. Four were his. The other eleven are stacked to the picture rail with other people's estates, boxed and numbered in a sequence that does not skip.

In the cold back room, one box has been opened and not closed. Inside it, in a plain oak frame, eight people on a porch. Sky, rail, every dress gone to one flat amber. Third from the left in the back row, one face at the density it was printed at. Harlan catalogues it under household goods and prices it at nothing.